November 9, 2009, 1:58 pm
Only a few days until the openSUSE 11.2 launch. Spending time today checking media and getting ready to have the openSUSE promo DVDs created. Don’t forget: 11.2 will be released on Thursday!
I’ve been running openSUSE 11.2 RC’s and betas on various machines. Today I wiped all that from my main workstation (dual Xeon 3.2 GHz, 8GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX 1400) and installed the openSUSE GNOME live CD 64-bit.
After that, I whipped the Nvidia drivers on so I could enjoy maximum dual-screen goodness. Here’s the result:
I love having tons of screen real estate! I remember back when configuring multiple monitors on Linux was a royal pain… things have gotten so much better in that regard.
The full process is outlined on the openSUSE wiki. Basically:
- Make sure you have the prerequisite packages installed:
gcc, make, kernel-source, kernel-syms, kernel-desktop-devel
- Prep the kernel source:
cd /usr/src/linux ; make cloneconfig ; make prepare - Download the Nvidia drivers for your card.
- Switch to init level 3 and run the script you got from the Nvidia Web site.
- Then use nvidia-xconfig and sax2 to configure. (You may not need to use the nvidia-xconfig for some versions of the driver.)
It looks like it’s more work than it actually is. The easy way to do it is to just grab it from the Nvidia repos, but they don’t have 11.2 available just yet.
